By Danielle Andrews
If you believe in The Law of Attraction, then you understand that what you project out into the universe comes right back to you. That is why it’s so important when writing your wish list for the “perfect mate” that it comes from your heart and not from some skewed idea of what society, friends, family or impossible social media posts tell you what you should have, should want or deserve. So take a few minutes to sit quietly and ask yourself, “What does my heart really desire?”
There’s a version of “the one” living rent-free in most of our heads. She’s effortlessly put-together, never has a bad skin day, always knows what to say. He’s got the six-pack, the six-figure job, the emotional intelligence of a therapist, and somehow also has time to surprise you with flowers on a random Tuesday. This person is patient but never boring, ambitious but never absent, spontaneous but never unreliable. They exist in carousel posts, in “get the bag and the man” reels, in curated highlight reels that never show the argument that happened twenty minutes before the photo was taken.
The problem isn’t that we want good things. The problem is that we’ve stopped asking whether these things are our things.
Give yourself the love you seek, and the universe will send people who match it.
Abraham Hicks
The Wishlist We Didn’t Write
Somewhere along the way, dating stopped being about discovering what makes you feel safe, seen, and alive with another person, and started looking more like assembling a spec sheet. Height. Income bracket. Aesthetic. Follower count, sometimes literally. We inherited this wishlist from advertising, from algorithm-fed content, from group chats that reward the flashiest update, from a culture that has quietly convinced us that love is a competition to be won rather than a connection to be built.
Social media didn’t invent unrealistic standards, but it industrialized them. It gave every person a highlight reel and told us to compare our whole, messy selves to someone else’s edited best moments. Worse, it did the same thing to our expectations of a partner. We’re not just comparing our bodies or our bank accounts anymore — we’re comparing our relationships to a fantasy that no real person, including the one scrolling right alongside us, could ever fully live up to.
So it’s worth asking, honestly: when you picture your ideal partner, whose voice is doing the picturing? Is it yours? Or is it your mother’s disappointment, your ex’s insecurities, a TikTok trend, a friend group’s unspoken hierarchy of “good catches”?
The Difference Between True Desire and Superficial Requirements
There’s a quiet exhaustion that comes from chasing a version of love you don’t even actually want. You can spend years dating people who check every socially sanctioned box — attractive, successful, impressive on paper — and still feel a persistent hum of something’s off. That feeling isn’t you being ungrateful or too picky. It’s often a sign that what you think you want and what your heart truly desires are misaligned.
Superficial love looks like staying with someone because they look good next to you in photos. It looks like overlooking incompatibility because their job title impresses your family. It looks like ending things with someone who is genuinely kind and curious because they didn’t match the aesthetic you’d unconsciously absorbed as “the standard.”
Actual desire looks different. It’s quieter, less flashy, and much harder to explain to people who are asking about someone else’s checklist. It might sound like: I want someone who remembers the small things I say. I want someone who isn’t afraid of my ambition. I want someone whose silence feels comfortable, not tense. I want someone I can be a little unfiltered around. None of that trends particularly well online. All of it matters enormously in a real, lived-in relationship.
Reframing the Search
Reframing what you’re looking for starts with separating two questions that get tangled together: What do I think I should want? and What actually makes me feel most like myself? These are not always the same person, and the gap between them is often where heartbreak and confusion live.
Try this: instead of listing traits, list feelings. Not “tall, ambitious, stylish,” but “curious, steady, playful, emotionally available.” Feelings are harder to fake and harder to buy into a curated persona. A person can look perfect on paper and still leave you feeling small, anxious, or unseen. Someone else might not check a single box you thought mattered and still make you feel entirely at ease in your own skin. That feeling is real. Trust it.
It also helps to notice what you’re actually drawn to in quiet, unguarded moments — not who you post about or brag about, but who you miss when they’re not around, who you laugh with without trying, who makes ordinary Tuesdays feel lighter. Those unremarkable, unphotographable moments are often more honest indicators of compatibility than anything a highlight reel could capture.
The Law of Attraction, If You Believe In It
The Law of Attraction, a belief popularized by Abraham Hicks, Louise Hay and many others has recently been given credence by the science of Quantum Physics.
If you subscribe to the law of attraction — the idea that your dominant thoughts and energy shape what you draw into your life — then this reframing matters even more. Because if you’re spending your mental and emotional energy chasing an image built from comparison, insecurity, and social pressure, you’re not actually attracting what you want. You’re attracting a projection of what you’ve been told to want. You end up manifesting a relationship that photographs well but doesn’t feel like home.
Clarity is the actual engine behind the law of attraction, not vague ambition. Vague wanting — “someone attractive and successful” — casts a wide net for the wrong things, because it’s borrowed language, not lived truth. Specific, felt wanting — “someone who makes me feel safe enough to be fully myself, who’s curious about my inner world, who shows up consistently” — is a much clearer signal to put out into the world, because it’s rooted in something real. You can’t attract clarity from confusion. And you can’t manifest authenticity from a borrowed script.
When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
Paulo Coelho
Coming Home to Yourself First
Ultimately, reframing what you’re looking for in a partner is less about romance and more about self-honesty. It asks you to quiet the noise — the algorithms, the comparisons, the inherited expectations — long enough to hear what you actually feel drawn to. Not what impresses people. Not what looks good in a caption. What makes you feel like the truest, most at-ease version of yourself.
So write another perfect mate checklist, ask yourself the only question that actually matters: What does your heart truly desire? Not your feed. Not your friend group. Not the algorithm. You.
The answer might surprise you — and it’s probably been there all along, waiting for you to stop looking for it somewhere else.
Our late Co-CEO, Amber Kelleher-Andrews, was a BIG believer in The Law of Attraction and those who knew her intimately watched her manifest just about everything in her life she wished for. She shared this divine belief with her employees and clients which is one of the reasons Kelleher-International is the most successful upscale matchmaking service in the world.
So if you’re ready to put your heart on paper and take the leap of faith, give us a call and let’s get the universe rolling!
